A Westminister teen has sued three Westminster police officers in Denver federal court claiming they pulled him onto the floor without provocation and beat him in the head while removing him from his home and his mother’s custody.

Emiliano Archuletta brought the civil lawsuit Thursday against Heather Wood, Louis Engleberg and Reed Giles in Denver U.S. District Court.

A message left with Westminster police seeking comment was not immediately returned on Friday.

On the afternoon of July 27, 2016, when Archuletta was 16, he walked into his apartment at 1585 115th Ave. and found two Adams County social workers and three police officers, the lawsuit says.

Archuletta walked into the kitchen. When he learned the authorities were there to remove him and his two siblings from his home and away from their mother who lost custody of them, Archuletta tried to exit the apartment, the lawsuit says.

Wood stopped him and told him he was not free to leave, the lawsuit says. Archuleta went back to the kitchen and bowed his head. The officers told Archuleta that it was time to leave because the “scene needed to be cleared,” the lawsuit says.

Wood grabbed the boy’s upper arm and “forcibly remove” him from the apartment. Giles and Englenberg grabbed Archuletta and the three officers threw him to the floor, the lawsuit says.

Giles kneeled on Archuletta’s legs while Wood and Engleberg repeatedly hit the teen in the head and back, injuring him, the lawsuit said. They handcuffed Archuletta and took him to the Adams County Juvenile Assessment Center.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.

Prosecutors and investigators on Friday detailed the rising tensions between the two neighbors, a combative relationship that ended with the fatal shooting of the 46-year-old Cunningham, an assistant high school principal in Aurora and former University of Colorado football star.